Thursday, December 22, 2011

Christmas Around the World Part 3

About a week ago, I started posting about Christmas Around the World . The second part of the week I teamed up with my awesome teacher neighbor and we learned all about different winter traditions around the world. I keep forgetting to post about it. (Has anyone's else life been completely crazy??)

Well, The kids LOVED it and here is a little bit of what we learned!

In my room we visited Italy first! Buon Natale! We learned about Italian culture, geography and how they celebrate Christmas with a Notebook file that I created. Then, we learned about the Legend Old Befana and the students created a shoe for Befana to leave a treat in for them!

Then, the students worked in pairs and created a venn diagram in Inspiration to compare Befana and Santa Claus. I wish I would have saved copies of those on my jump drive, but they are at school.

The next day we went down under and visited Australia. I wanted to teach about Australia because we have been studying the solar system and had just learned the reason we have seasons. We learned some fun facts about Australia and we watched a 12 Days of Christmas Aussie style. Then we created a snow globe of Santa surfing!

The last place that we visited in my class was India. We studied the Diwali "Festival of Lights". We have a third grader who is originally from India, so it was so cool for her to be able to share her experiences with the classes! The students made Rangoli Patterns, like the people from Indian paint on their floors for good luck. The students used Geoboards first to come up geometric, symmetrical pattern, and then they drew it on dotted paper.

In my teammate's classroom, the student visited The Netherlands and learned about Sinterklaas and made windmills. Then they visited Mexico and made pinatas! The last place they visited was Israel to learn all about Hanukkah.

It was a great week and I really enjoyed myself. The students wrote in their travel journals every day and it really showed how much they had learned. We also created a Voicethread about all of the places we visited. My students LOVE hearing themselves recorded.

Did you guys do Christmas Around the World in your class? Where did you visit?